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« Liberal Outrage: November 2016 | Main | Liberal Outrage: January 2017 » Liberal OutrageI Hate the Name Calling "Criticisms" I get the desire. I'm constantly calling people "asshats" (in case you haven't noticed). It makes me feel better. But i'm writing blog posts to fnord12 (and possibly some of our stupid friends). This is me having a conversation with fnord12 while we're at work and not sitting on our couch where we could have this conversation otherwise. I can say "asshat" on my couch! I think the media needs to do a little better though. Trump sexually assaulting someone should not get equal/less focus than his crazy tweets insulting the cast of a musical. When John Oliver started his "Drumpf" campaign, it made me cringe inside. Every time Jimmy Dore says "Donnie Tiny Hands", i hate it a little more. There was a point where it stopped being amusing and started to feel juvenile and not particularly productive. Isn't this the sort of crap Rush Limbaugh does? Do i want to equate John Oliver with Rush Limbaugh??? Nathan J. Robinson argues that there is a better way to criticize Trump. Unfortunately, media outrage about Trump frequently adopts a uniform level of outrage at his acts. Trump's history is treated as a set of bad things, meaning that few distinctions are made among which kinds of transgressions are worse. But there are lesser and greater crimes. Trump's constant theft of wages and payments from dishwashers, cabinet-makers, and servers is far more consequential than, say, his promotion of a failed mail-order steak franchise. But press coverage often treats such things as being of equal interest. And also, But mounting effective attacks against Trump requires caring about being effective to begin with. The more Democrats spend time talking about things like, say, Trump angering China with a phone call to Taiwan (isn't the left supposed to favor talking to Taiwan?), the less we'll zero in on Trump's true political weaknesses. Trump wants us to talk about his feud with the cast of Hamilton. He does not want us to force him to talk seriously about policy. Cereally! Who isn't tired of the US pretending to not talk to Taiwan so that China won't get pissy about it? We should be talking to Taiwan! China needs to get over it. Coddling them is not going to help them move on. Buncha whiners. By min | December 15, 2016, 9:33 AM | Liberal Outrage | Link The postmortems i've been linking to have been focused on policy issues, since i'm interested in seeing the Democratic party rebuild itself after a series of staggering defeats and move away from the DLC centrist philosophy that's been driving it since Bill Clinton. This Politico article focuses on the strategic and tactical mistakes. I don't think there are many lessons to learn from this sort of thing, except in a kind of narrow sense about who to hire to run a campaign next time. But since a lot of Democrats are resisting the need to change, citing the fact that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote, i think this is worth calling out: Basically, they deliberately ran up the popular votes in places that didn't matter (tactically speaking). I'm 100% in favor of eliminating the electoral college (and not just during the month after a Democrat loses the electoral vote while winning the popular vote), but you can't claim that Trump is somehow illegitimate for winning by the rules everyone understood in advance. Or that everything is fine and we don't need to change anything for next time. You can argue that the people running the Clinton campaign were idiots for taking the Rust Belt for granted while trying to run up the score for bragging rights elsewhere. By fnord12 | December 15, 2016, 8:48 AM | Liberal Outrage | Link By fnord12 | December 12, 2016, 11:04 AM | Liberal Outrage | Link The Labor Party's history is not well-known in the broader progressive world. But as the most recent major effort by organized labor to form an independent party, it is a story that should interest anyone who hopes to see a revival of left politics, because on the Left only unions have the scale, experience, resources, and connections with millions of workers needed to mount a permanent, nationwide electoral project. By all accounts it was an inspiring effort that seemed, for a moment, to portend a renaissance for the labor-left. But the party lost momentum just a few years after its founding. By 2007 it had effectively ceased to exist. They never ran a candidate for fear of splitting the vote and ending up with a Republican, so it's no surprise if you didn't know about their existence. The dilemma stands out clearly in the recollections of Labor Party veterans. "The Labor Party had to start with the assurance that it wouldn't play spoiler politics and that it would [first] focus on building the critical mass necessary for serious electoral intervention," former LP national organizer Mark Dudzic recalled in a recent interview. Yet, as Les Leopold of the Labor Institute told Brown, that path ultimately led to irrelevance: "It's not easy for Americans to understand a party that's not electoral. I think that that was just a difficult sell." No shit. I recommend reading the entire article. It goes on to talk about the problems of trying to make changes from within the Democratic party, which sort of seems like the only other option if there's no chance of a viable third party. It's true that a number of sincere, committed leftists, or at least progressives, run for office on the Democratic ballot line at all levels of American politics. Sometimes they even win. And all else equal, we're better off with such politicians in office than without them. So in that limited sense, the answer might be "yes." I'm not sure i understand exactly how this would work. It sounds like a union or a really really big club. And i'm not sure that the national leadership would be as beholden to the members as imagined. In theory, the American Federation of Teachers union leadership is beholden to its members, but they have and can make unilateral decision to publically endorse candidates without consulting the membership with very little consequence to themselves. And if they're going to run candidates in the primaries, why not just do that within the Democratic party as opposed to nominally being independent? By min | December 9, 2016, 1:34 PM | Liberal Outrage | Link I don't know if this violates my "no more post-mortems" promise, but i early linked to the first two parts of Ryan Cooper's four parter, and i've realized that the second two parts are now out and quite good. And they're really about rebuilding the Democratic party, so they're not post-mortems anymore anyway. Here's part three and the bottom of it links to part four. That's not to say that realistic ideas are bad, or that one should be deliberately dishonest, but that the time for drilling down on the minute details is after the election is won. remember how all the pundits kept criticizing Bernie cause he didn't have a "specific" plan for everything under the sun? and only had general policies outlined? GRR! By fnord12 | December 8, 2016, 6:25 PM | Liberal Outrage | Link I thought this was a good write-up by Katie Halper. I love that the Clinton campaign's final contribution to politics is an argument over the meaning of what the word "but" is. It has a certain symmetry to it. I remember reading this exchange during the primary and how it made me feel queasy: The audience responded to each of these questions with... "No!" I kept waiting for Clinton's plan to end discrimination and the policy differences she had from Sanders that necessitated abandoning his economic approach. But nothing ever surfaced. By fnord12 | December 8, 2016, 8:51 AM | Liberal Outrage | Link After Trump falsely claimed on Twitter that he would have won the popular vote "if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally", the media (rightly) demanded to know where he got that information. And Trump told them it was from the Washington Post: How many non-citizens participate in U.S. elections? More than 14 percent of non-citizens in both the 2008 and 2010 samples indicated that they were registered to vote. Furthermore, some of these non-citizens voted. Our best guess, based upon extrapolations from the portion of the sample with a verified vote, is that 6.4 percent of non-citizens voted in 2008 and 2.2 percent of non-citizens voted in 2010. Richman and Earnest's thesis was extremely controversial, and was so heavily criticized that the Post ultimately published a note preceding the article, pointing out that many objections to the work had been made. But the Post never actually retracted or withdrew the piece. In response, the Washington Post went in a weird direction: Without actually linking to the Post's original article about voting by non-citizens, fact-checker Michelle Ye Hee Lee tried to claim that the study wasn't really in the Washington Post. Instead, she said, it: "was published two years ago in the Monkey Cage, a political-science blog hosted by The Washington Post. (Note to Trump's staff members: This means you can't say The Washington Post reported this information; you have to cite the Monkey Cage blog.)" I'll link directly to the original article and let you decide if you would cite that as coming from the Post. I would (even still). Now (and this shouldn't need to be said) this is not a defense of Trump. That article clearly had major problems and should obviously not have been cited by anyone, let alone the President-Elect on a topic that undermines faith in our democracy and stirs up hate for immigrants. The point is how much the Washington Post sucks in a) publishing that without skepticism, b) not retracting it after it got multiple takedowns from experts, and c) resorting to the lame defense that it wasn't "really" them after Trump cited it. This has relevance to another story. A few posts down i linked to a few discussions of the Washington Post's unskeptical article on PropOrNot, the organization that is pushing a list of "fake news" sites that, among other things, it advocates get investigated by the FBI (a list that features many legit, if non-mainstream, sites). After much pushback, the Post has put a mealy mouthed "Editor's Note" at the top of the article, saying that they don't vouch for PropOrNot and that it was only one of four organizations mentioned in their article. As Adam Johnson of FAIR says, that's bullshit. 90% of the Post's article was about PropOrNot, and it was the only part of the article that was new (i.e. "news"). PropOrNot had some very specific claims about the number of "planted" articles that were viewed. And when the Post's article first came out, it was widely cited by major pundits and Clinton campaign operatives on Twitter, all who have large followings. So talking about undermining faith in democracy, we now have a Post article shared by millions who think that it's proof that Russia hacked our election. The Post's belated editor's note won't get nearly as much coverage, and since the Post isn't actually retracting the article, it will still be there for someone to cite the same way Trump cited the election fraud article. By the way, i did check the Post's PropOrNot article, and it says "Business" in the same place that the election fraud article said "Monkey Cage". Does that mean i should be saying that it's not a Washington Post article, it's a Business article? P.S. The article i linked to at top also gets into the topic of fact checking sites and their flaws; it's worth a full read. By fnord12 | December 8, 2016, 7:35 AM | Liberal Outrage | Link *snort* "[It is] a cross between a 'black swan' - a rare, low-probability, unanticipated event with enormous ramifications - and 'the elephant in the room': a problem that is widely visible to everyone, yet that no one wants to address, even though we absolutely know that one day it will have vast, black-swan-like consequences." You would think he could just say, "The climate change problem is a cross between a black swan and the elephant in the room - or, as I like to call it, a Black Elephant." Instead he leads audiences through drawn-out explanations of two everyday terms. Moreover his unnecessary definition of "the elephant in the room" contains the phrase "black swan," making what was originally a relatively simple idea now a kind of circular movie-within-a-movie image that is more than a little hard to follow: "A black elephant is a cross between a black swan event and the elephant in the room, which is an ignored but visibly obvious problem that will inevitably become a black swan event." You're still grappling with that when you learn "there are a herd of environmental black elephants out there." It's almost too easy to mock Thomas Friedman, but he's out there influencing people with his make-no-sense words so he definitely deserves all the mockery that can be bestowed upon him. And there are graphs!!! I'm dying! By min | December 6, 2016, 12:36 PM | Liberal Outrage | Link They're willing to risk civil war to install John Kasich as president. By fnord12 | December 6, 2016, 8:22 AM | Liberal Outrage | Link I thought this Harper's article was just going to talk about the recent claims that Russia hacked our election and/or has been targeting us with "fake news". But it's actually a deep dive into our history of inflating the threat of Russia. It's a good, but long, read. Regarding the "fake news", it's worth seeing this (and similar write-ups by the Intercept and Matt Taibbi and others) regarding the latest claim from the Washington Post, which has smeared leftie websites like Naked Capitalism (which we've read and linked to for years), CounterPunch, and Black Agenda Report, and right-leaning and libertarian sites like Antiwar and the Ron Paul Institute and even the Drudge Report, all with no evidence. By fnord12 | December 2, 2016, 8:55 AM | Liberal Outrage | Link Emptywheel has some interesting thoughts on our industrial policy (i'd say "or lack thereof", but her point is that we actually do have one). By fnord12 | December 1, 2016, 12:12 PM | Liberal Outrage | Link Most importantly, he reminds all the blockheads that hey, you can actually fight for people of color and the white working class at the same goddamned time! The way the working class is always controlled is that it's divided. When you don't stand together in solidarity, the other side starts picking off groups, and they end up hurting everybody. ...many people in the white working class voted for Obama twice, and then they voted for Trump. The way I see it, the alt-right movement is parasitic, trying to insert itself into the legitimate grievances of the American working class. If they are allowed to be successful, everyone's situation is going to get worse. Once they turn us against each other, they get people competing against each other, our focus turns, and the economic situation gets worse. Why is the south historically the poorest part of the country? Because when they held black people in slavery, they didn't have to pay white people much of nothing. So we are all better off when we have solidarity. We need to unify because if we're together, we can make a common demand for more fairness and more prosperity. By min | December 1, 2016, 12:07 PM | Liberal Outrage | Link Lest we get confused because Trump did something to save jobs that Obama didn't, Sanders reminds us why Trump's deal was a chump deal. Loathe as i am to give WaPo traffic...Link. In essence, United Technologies took Trump hostage and won. And that should send a shock wave of fear through all workers across the country. Trump has endangered the jobs of workers who were previously safe in the United States. Why? Because he has signaled to every corporation in America that they can threaten to offshore jobs in exchange for business-friendly tax benefits and incentives. Even corporations that weren't thinking of offshoring jobs will most probably be re-evaluating their stance this morning. And who would pay for the high cost for tax cuts that go to the richest businessmen in America? The working class of America. If Donald Trump won't stand up for America's working class, we must. By min | December 1, 2016, 12:00 PM | Liberal Outrage | Link Yglesias makes a fair point (warning: Twitter): "When Obama used leverage over contractors to get paid leave for *over a million people* it was a minor story." He means this in contrast to Trump's Carrier actions. But two counterpoints: 1) First, Trump (unsurprisingly) knows how to promote himself. You can whine all you want about lack of media coverage. Trump makes his own. Why couldn't Democrats? In part it's because they're embarrassed about what they do because they're triangulating between opposing constituents. In part because they're meek and don't like getting yelled at by Republicans. Trump welcomes the fight with the "losers and haters" and makes sure his supporters know (and/or believe) that he's fighting for them. 2) Obama didn't start doing stuff like this until the Dems lost their third straight Congressional election after he was elected. We talked about this at the time. Suddenly Obama found out that he could do things. So very late in his administration he started taking executive action, and many of these things haven't even gone into effect yet. The thing that Yglesias is talking about was announced at the end of this September. By the time it would have gone into effect, Trump will have reversed it. Similarly, we cheered when Obama updated the overtime threshold. That has since been put on hold by a district court in Texas, and i guarantee Trump won't pursue the appeal. As we've said before, you have to have this stuff ready for the day you walk into office. Hell, Trump isn't even waiting until he's president. Whichever Democrats are looking at themselves in the mirror and saying "2020" had better have a long list of the things they are going to do in their first 100 days that don't need to go through Congress, both so they can tout them on the campaign trail and so we don't have to wait seven years before they start enacting them. By fnord12 | December 1, 2016, 11:42 AM | Liberal Outrage | Link « Liberal Outrage: November 2016 | Main | Liberal Outrage: January 2017 » |